Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/474

454 P N P N less duel with a journalist on the subject. L Honneur et L Argent, one of his most successful plays, was acted in 1853, and he became an Academician in 1855. For some years he did little, but in 1866 he obtained great success with Le Lion Amoureux. He died a year later at Paris in July 1867, soon after his nomination to the commander- ship of the Legion of Honour. His widow was pensioned. Ponsard is no doubt in some ways a remarkable dramatist. Unlike most men who have achieved considerable success on the stage, he did not overwrite himself, and most of his plays hold a certain steady level of literary and dramatic ability. But, as has been said, his popularity is in the main due to the fact that he found an actress ready to hand for his pieces, and that his appearance coincided with a certain public weariness of the grander but also more extravagant and unequal style of 1830. PONTANUS, JOVIANUS (1426-1503), a famous Italian humanist and poet, was born in 1426 at Cerreto in the duchy of Spoleto, where his father was murdered in one of the frequent civil brawls which then disturbed the peace of Italian towns. His mother escaped with the boy to Perugia, and it was here that Pontano received his first instruction in languages and literature. Failing to recover his patrimony, he abandoned Umbria, and at the age of twenty-two established himself at Naples, which con tinued to be his chief place of residence during a long and prosperous career. He here began a close friendship with the distinguished scholar, Antonio Beccadelli, through whose influence he gained admission to the royal chancery of Alphonso the Magnanimous. Alphonso discerned the singular gifts of the young scholar, and made him tutor to his sons. Pontano s connexion with the Aragonese dynasty as political adviser, military secretary, and chancellor was henceforth a close one ; and the most doubtful passage in his diplomatic career is when he welcomed Charles VIII. of France upon the entry of that king into Naples j in 1495, thus showing that he was too ready to abandon , the princes upon whose generosity his fortunes had been raised. Pontano illustrates in a marked manner the posi tion of power to which men of letters and learning had arrived in Italy. He entered Naples as a penniless scholar. He was almost immediately made the companion and trusted friend of its sovereign, loaded with honours, lodged in a fine house, enrolled among the nobles of the realm, enriched, and placed at the very height of social importance. Following the example of Pomponio Leto in^Rome and of Cosimo de Medici at Florence, Pontano founded an academy for the meetings of learned and dis tinguished men. This became the centre of fashion as well as of erudition in the southern capital, and subsisted long after its founder s death. In 1461 he married his first wife, Adriana Sassone, who bore him one son and three daughters before her death in 1491. Nothing dis tinguished Pontano more than the strength of his domestic feeling. He was passionately attached to his wife and children; and, while his friend Beccadelli signed the licentious verses of Hennaphroditus, his own Muse cele brated in liberal but loyal strains the pleasures of conjugal affection, the charm of infancy, and the sorrows of a husband and a father in the loss of those he loved. Not long after the death of his first wife Pontano took in second marriage a beautiful girl of Ferrara, who is only known to us under the name of Stella. Although he was at least sixty-five years of age at this period, his poetic faculty displayed itself with more than usual warmth and lustre in the glowing series of elegies, styled Eridanus, which he poured forth to commemorate the rapture of this union. Stella s one child, Lucilio, survived his birth but fifty days ; nor did his mother long remain to comfort the scholar s old age. Pontano had already lost his only son by the first marriage ; therefore his declining years were solitary. He died in 1 503 at Naples, where a remarkable group of terra-cotta figures, life-sized and painted, still adorns his tomb in the church of Monte Oliveto. He is there represented together with his patron Alphonso and his friend Sannazzaro in adoration before the dead Christ. As a diplomatist and state official Pontano played a part of some importance in the affairs of southern Italy and in the Barons War, the wars with Rome, and tle expulsion and restoration of the Aragonese dynasty. But his chief claim upon the attention of pos terity is as a scholar. His writings divide themselves into disserta tions upon such topics as the " Liberality of Princes " or " Ferocity," composed in the rhetorical style of the day, and poems. He was distinguished for energy of Latin style, for vigorous intellectual powers, and for the faculty, rare among his contemporaries, of expressing the facts of modern life, the actualities of personal emotion, in language sufficiently classical yet always characteristic of the man. His prose treatises are more useful to students of manners than the similar lucubrations of Poggio. Yet it was prin cipally as a Latin poet that he exhibited his full strength. An ambitious didactic composition in hexameters, entitled Urania, embodying the astronomical science of the age, and adorning this high theme with brilliant mythological episodes, won the admira tion of Italy. It still remains a monument of fertile invention, exuberant facility, and energetic handling of material. Xot less excellent is the didactic poem on orange trees, De llortis Iles- peridum. His most original compositions in Verse, however, are elegiac and hendecasyllabic pieces on personal topics the De Con- jugali Amorc, Eridanus, Tumuli, Neenix, Bniee, &c. in which he uttered his vehemently passionate emotions with a warmth of southern colouring, an evident sincerity, and a truth of painting from reality which make the reader pardon an erotic freedom that is alien to our present taste. These lyrical compositions breathe the atmosphere of Naples, reproduce its scenery with wonderful brilliancy, and introduce us to the customs of its pleasure-loving pagan people. Yet, in spite of their excessive voluptuousness, we rise from their perusal convinced that their author was essentially a good man, a loving husband and father, and an attached friend. Pontano s prose and poems were printed by the Aldi at Venice. For his life see Ardito, Giovanni Pontano e i suoi Tempi, Naples, 1871 ; for his place in the history of literature, Symonds, Renais sance in Italy. (J. A. S.) PONTECORVO, a city of Italy -in the province of Caserta, on the left bank of the Garigliano, with a popu lation of 5172 in 1881 (commune 10,191), answers to the ancient Fregellse, a Volscian city, colonized in 323 B.C. by the Romans, who thus occasioned the Second Samnite War. The principality of Pontecorvo (about 40 square miles in extent), which Napoleon lestowed on Bernadotte in 1806, was in 1810 incorporated with the French empire. PONTEFRACT, or POMFEET, a market town and municipal and parliamentary ..borough in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, finely situated on an eminence near the junction of the Calder and Aire, and on three railway lines, 13 miles south-east of Leeds, and 14 north-west of Doncaster. The streets are wide and regular, and there are many good houses and shops. A park over 300 acres in extent is used as a public recreation ground. The most important of the antiquarian remains are the ruins of the famous castle situated on a rocky height, originally cover ing with its precincts an area of over 8 acres, and contain ing in all eight round towers. The principal feature remaining is the keep. The castle is said to occupy the site of a fortress erected by Ailric, a Saxon thane. It was founded by Ilbert de Lacy shortly after the Conquest, and probably nearly completed by Ilbert de Lacy the second, [ who died about 1141. From that time till its demolition in 1649 it was the great stronghold of South Yorkshire. | It was the cradle of the dukes of Lancaster, and in it Richard II. was, after his deposition, " kept secretly " till his death. Many persons of rank and influence have been confined in it as political prisoners. During the wars of j York and Lancaster it was a centre of intrigue and con- ! spiracy. In 1536 it surrendered to Aske, the leader of the "pilgrimage of grace." At the beginning of the Civil War it was garrisoned for Charles, and it under

went four sieges, three of them by the Parliamentary